What the hell is going on at NBC? Well, considering that their brilliant plan amounted to bringing late night-ratings in to prime time, the consensus is that NBC is currently reaping the whirlwind. “They had a bad idea,” people say, “And now they’re paying for it.” And that might be true. But, honestly, I think that’s just not fair. Having to live up to the consequences of bad decisions? That’s not how the entertainment industry works.

We’ve seen it a million times: Every year, new television shows come out, only to sink without a trace before October rolls around. Every year, dozens of movies hit the theaters, never to be heard from again. The most likely result of any project that comes out of the entertainment industry is failure. How can an industry manage to survive that?

Avatar.

Actually, any successful movie, or TV show, or whatever can do the trick–Avatar is just the latest example of the phenomenon. A billion bucks can make up for a lot of box-office failures.

You can think of the industry as though it were an old-fashioned circus tent. It doesn’t need arches and a good foundation in order to stay up, just a few really tall poles in just the right spots. Hits are the tall poles that keep the roof from falling on the animals.

What’s happening at NBC right now is an illustration of how this all works. They gambled with that whole Leno Show deal, but it turned out that it was a bad bet–and the only reason that makes any kind of difference has to do with the fact that, unless you’ve got enough blockbusters to back you up, you really can’t cover a hell of a lot of bad bets without getting into some trouble. And, right now, NBC looks especially desperate–and dumb.

That’s not really fair though, because everything the entertainment industry does is a gamble. Sure, sure–they’ve got market research, focus group testing, projections, and all that stuff, which are all elaborate schemes designed to convince anyone who might be watching that the people in charge know what they’re doing.  The plain fact is, nobody has any fucking clue what they’re doing.

Okay, maybe I went a bit too far, there.

What I’m really saying is that nobody knows for sure what’s going to work, and what isn’t. Even all those people who said at the beginning that the Jay Leno Show is the worst idea in television history were only guessing. There was a slim chance that it could have been a successful, game-changing win for NBC, and wouldn’t we all look stupid if it had worked out.

But it didn’t. And NBC doesn’t have any kind of Avatar of their own right now–no single hit huge enough (or series of smaller hits that add up enough) to cushion the blow. Luckily, they’ll have some money coming in, soon.